Responding to customer complaints is just one critical part of good customer service. There’s a lot more to it. We are a part of a digital-first and experience-driven economy, where customer service is a strategic and vital element for customer service. It impacts the entire customer journey.
A study by Zendesk shows that 82% of the consumers do not visit a company again after having a bad customer experience. This was for individual consumers, but it holds true for B2B businesses too. More than 50% of the companies avoid vendors who do not provide good customer support.
When customer support is such an influence on customer retention, it would be foolish to not put enough effort into it– even more than product and price, if needed. In this article, we’ll talk about how you can bring your brand forward by providing good customer support.
How Customer Service Impacts Customer Retention?
From handling complaints to answering questions to scheduling appointments for maintenance, everything is a part of customer service. Basically, whenever a customer engages with someone from your team, it counts as a customer service experience.
Just like how the quality of your product sends a message to your consumers, your customer service also shows how your brand delivers the promises. Whenever customers have a good product and support experience, they’ll want to do repeat business with you more often than not.
Your competitors might be offering the same products at the same price. This is where you can get ahead of them by leveraging the power of a good customer service experience. On the flip side of it, if you fail to meet your customers’ expectations and provide a bad experience, they’ll not want to continue with you. The next section will provide you with some practical ways to improve your customer service experience.
5 Ways for Customer Support Team to Improve Customer Retention
Before you jump into improving customer retention, first, you need to understand why your customers leave. And then, you can find ways in which your customer support teams can put a positive impact on those reasons.
Other than the specific reasons your support team can improve, here are some areas you should consider working on.
Introduce Voicemail Greetings
When your customers call your business support team for queries, whatever message they hear is important. Especially when there’s no one to take the call, handling them with personalized voicemail greetings really helps.
Voicemail greetings are the first thing that a customer hears from your business. Meaning, it is the only chance you get to make a good first impression.
It might not appear to be useful in the beginning, but it is a lot better than making your customers sit idle with unending rings. It not only helps in impressing your customers, but a good after hours voicemail script can also ensure that you win their business.
Understand the Numbers
Rope someone in who can analyze your business and finance and can help you understand what are the numbers that drive your business. Try to know as much as you can about your customers. The better you understand their buying journey and value of your product for them, the more it’ll help your customer support team in being better and more effective customer advocates.
Help Customers in Onboarding Process
In many businesses, there’s a long gap of time from when customers finish the sign-up process and when they actually start getting the values that they expected from you. This is where your customer support team can enter the chat. They can bridge the gap by suggesting optimizations, explaining features, and guiding customers to use the product better.
Ask Better Questions
Customers only ask the questions they think they need, but many times, those are not the answers that they really need to succeed. Create a customer support team that is curious about solving the problems of your customers.
The team can ask questions to understand the goals better, and then provide customers with answers that they really need to succeed. The conversations might become longer, but it’s a long-term retention strategy.
Answer, Anticipate, and Elaborate
Answering just what was asked is so old school. If you wish to make your customer service impactful, you’ll have to go beyond that. You can try this AAE model:
Answer: Provide customers with the answers they are looking for.
Anticipate: Based on their current question, analyze what are the problems they might face in the next steps. Provide an answer for those questions too.
Elaborate: When you are done with the above two, you can share a video, help document, or any other helpful resource so that they don’t have to come to your support team again.
Better Customer Service = Better Customer Retention
Retaining customers is not as hard as it may appear to be. If you want your customers to keep coming back to you, just keep delivering value to your customers. Not all happy customers will come back to do more business with you, but almost all of them will spread good word of mouth– which is as good as retention.
